Overview
Currently, more and more people use digital devices for entertainment, communication, and work. Thus, digital marketing is commonly used by marketers all around the world. Digital marketing is a strategy that uses the Internet as a means of conducting marketing activities and exchanging information between customers and businesses. Here are the top 5 marketing channels to improve conversion that every marketer should consider to boost your business at a high level.
What is digital marketing?
Nowadays, most businesses use digital marketing as an indispensable promotional tool to build their brand, sell their products and services, and increase their profit. According to the latest mobile marketing statistics, 66% of the total global population uses mobile phones, and 59.5% of the global population uses the Internet. Therefore, digital marketing is considered one of the most effective ways to connect with customers.
What is digital marketing? Digital marketing is any kind of marketing that happens on a digital platform. At a high level, digital marketing refers to advertising delivered through digital marketing channels such as search engines, social media, email, websites, and mobile apps.
There are many types of digital marketing, such as SEO (search engine optimization), social media marketing, email marketing, Content Marketing, native advertising, and ad retargeting. Each of these is suitable for a distinct group of customers.
What is the right digital marketing channel for your business?
Not every digital marketing channel will benefit your business. Different channels have different purposes and audiences. It depends on what your business is, your target audience, marketing goals, budget, resources, or competition.
According to MarketingProfs, there are 2 million blog posts written every day, more than 350.000 tweets per minute. To stand out from your competition, you need to clearly understand the marketing channels and take advantage of them efficiently. Therefore, to identify the right digital marketing channels for your business, you should follow the below plans and carry them out step by step.
Firstly, you should study your target audience. Specifically, you should know where your ideal customers are; focus on their demographics, preferences, where they spend time, etc. For example, if your ideal customers are adolescents, you should prefer social media networks where the young are present every hour. In addition, if your business sells products related to babies, you should focus on the channels that mothers often use, etc.
The second step to being successful is to list your goals. Your goals play an important role in your choice of digital marketing channels. A CoSchedule study found that goal-setting marketers are 376% more likely than marketers who do not set goals. You can start by setting goals that are specific, relevant, and attainable. For instance, you can formulate long-term goals and short-term goals; the short-term goal is to increase 20% of customers’ access within 3 months, and the long-term goal is to increase 30% of of revenue in the next year.
The third one is setting your Marketing budget. Your budget will undoubtedly play an important role in choosing the right digital marketing channels. Each channel will need you to pay some money in different ways. For example, even though Facebook or Instagram are free for you to post blogs, you need to invest money in a comprehensive content marketing strategy, hire marketing teams, pay to advertise, or marketing tools.
Social Media Marketing
Definition & Statistics
Social media marketing is the activities including publishing great content on your social media profiles, listening to and engaging your followers, analyzing your results, and running social media advertisements on social media platforms such as Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc to connect with your customers to build your brand, increase sales, and drive website traffic.
This type of digital marketing is a great way to connect with your customers. Currently, there are billions of people using social networks every day.
For example, there are about 1.6 billion active users on the social networking site Facebook every day. On average, each person works about 1 hour on Facebook to interact with relatives and friends, follow different advertising pages, market information pages, etc. Regarding Youtube, this social media platform has a large number of logins and registrations each month, with about 1.9 billion accounts. Instagram also has more than 1 billion subscribers and users every month. This number is increasing every day because more and more people come to share and promote information on this social networking site. Every day, about 600 million people visit to do different activities. Besides, there are still a lot of other social media platforms that are heavily used that haven’t been pointed out yet.
Therefore, using social media as a marketing tool will help you reach the desired number of customer contacts.
Some types of social media platforms are suitable for each of your strategies.
- News Services(Digg, Sphinn, Newsvine, etc): reading news, voting, and commenting.
- Sharing Services(Flickr, Snapfish, YouTube, etc): sharing images, and videos.
- Networks Services(Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, etc): connecting and sharing.
- Bookmarking Services (Delicious, Faves, StumbleUpon, BlogMarks, Diigo, etc): sharing and bookmarking sites.
- Geolocation and meeting Services (Foursquare and Meetup): bring people together in real space rather than in cyberspace.
- Community-building Services( Wikipedia): such as Forums, and message boards.
- Review sites( TripAdvisor, Yelp, and Epinions): solicit customers’ feedback.
The benefits of social media marketing
Social networks are now an important part of every marketing strategy that any business should not miss. It is like a “minefield” to generate leads and attract customers.
There are some main benefits below to demonstrate how social media have a strong effect on marketing strategy.
1. Create Brand Recognition
Social media allows you to get your brand to people much more easily and quickly. Moreover, your brand will appeal to your audience even if they don’t intend to look for it or think about it.
2. Increase Sales
Social media has a higher lead rate than any other form of marketing. The chances of converting leads into actual sales are higher thanks to the more visibility that comes with it.
3. Measure Success with Analytics
The feature of Analytics is a marketing tool that helps you identify your media marketing efforts to find the right solutions. In addition, you can measure each social media platform to learn more about which of your social media posts is best for your audience.
4. Create Brand Awareness
Every post or content that you share on social media contributes to improving your brand. You can interact with a broad audience, produce your products or your service, and solve their problems until they convert.
5. Reduce Marketing Costs
You can sign up or create a profile for free on almost all social networks, and even though any paid promotion that you invest in is cheaper than other marketing tactics, Furthermore, social media helps you focus on the most relevant customers, so you just spend your money to reach the most relevant audience.
6. Higher Conversion Rate
Your conversion rates increase through ads by reaching a larger, more relevant audience and driving high-quality traffic to your website. With the ability to narrow down the most relevant audiences, brands attract people who have a high chance of converting into paying customers through ads. This will improve their sales and overall conversion rate.
7. Increase Brand Authority
Interacting and responding to customers shows your respect for them, creating their satisfaction. Besides, posting on social media and posting original content makes them see that you are more trustworthy.
8. Discover How To Connect With Your Audience by Using Social Listening
Social listening helps you understand what’s important to your audience and identify trends they follow. From there, you’ll learn about their problems and create content that solves their problems.
9. Get Marketplace Insights
Being active on social media keeps you informed about customer preferences and opinions. You can gain a deep understanding of who your customers are and can provide your products or services to them
10. Better Customer Satisfaction
When you interact with customers directly on social media, it makes them more loyal. Customers prefer receiving a personalized answer to an automatic one.
Social media marketing strategies
The key factor for doing social marketing well is having a strategy. Developing strategies is essential for growing your brand through social media.
There are 10 strategies below that every business should consult to carry out social media marketing efficiently.
- Start using chatbots
- Create a personalized experience for customers
- Make an efficient content marketing strategy
- Create communication for your audience
- Jazz up your profiles with the diverse content strategy
- Using brand advocates
- Create profiles on the relevant channels
- Establish a social media budget
- Run cross-channel campaign
- Tell a story by going live
Email Marketing
Definitions and statistics
Email Marketing is a form of direct marketing as well as digital marketing that uses email to promote your business products or services. It is when you send a commercial email message to your email subscribers — contacts who have signed up to your email list and given express permission to receive email communications from you.
Email is one of the first means of digital communication in the world. Some people believe that Email is not a new technology; however, email marketing is more widely used today than ever. According to Statista, there were 3,9 billion people using email in 2019. 80% of business professionals believe that email marketing increases customer retention (Emarsys, 2018). Therefore, there is no doubt that email is hailed as the most effective channel for marketing. Not having an email marketing strategy means missing out on sale opportunities and the chance to connect with a large number of customers.
Email marketing includes promotional emails and informational emails. Promotional emails are used to promote special offers, a new product releases, ebooks, or webinars. Besides, informational emails are used to share news related to your business or inform your customers of company announcements, new releases, etc.
The benefits of Email Marketing
There are some main advantages that email marketing will help your business.
1. Conversion
When you launch a sale or promotion, you can send an email marketing campaign to your email subscribers to drive sales.
2. Brand awareness
A personal email is more impactful than social media posts, where you cannot know who saw your post. Thus, showing up in your customers’ email inboxes will help increase your brand awareness.
3. Customer loyalty
Email can drive customer loyalty at every stage of the buyer journey: lead nurturing, conversion, onboarding, and retention.
4. Low costs
There is no print or postage and no fee paid for billboards, magazines, or other channels. Therefore, it is obvious that email marketing has a lower cost than mainstream marketing channels.
5. Easy to get started
Email marketing does not require a huge or professional marketing team. The content of an email is the most important thing to building a successful email.
Email marketing strategies
Setting email marketing strategies helps the marketer achieve desired marketing goals with email advertising. Marketers can layout their email advertising process ahead of time or the company can plan when to send time-based promotions or non-promotional emails.
There are 5 strategies below that are better for an email marketing campaign.
- Personalize your message
- Segment your subscribers
- Send mobile-friendly emails
- Test copy, design, and buttons
- Automate email campaigns when impossible
Website Marketing (SEO)
Definition and Statistics
What is Website Marketing? Website Marketing is a marketing process including all of the activities that produce, and attract the customers visiting and taking action on your website. The more traffic comes to the site, the more opportunities to put your value proposition in front of potential customers.
With an estimated 1,6 billion registered websites in 2019 and more than 4 billion Internet users, standing out on your website feels like an impossible task. However, we will always have some solutions, SEO(Search Engine Optimization) is one of the best ones for your marketing strategy. SEO is a set of methodologies used to make websites accessible to search engines and appeal to readers. Unlike paid search ads, you can not pay search engines to get higher organic search rankings, which means that you have to work for it.
Why is SEO important for marketing? SEO is a fundamental part of digital marketing because there are trillions of searches every year to find information about products and services. Therefore, standing out on your website is so essential to attracting more customers.
The benefits of website marketing
SEO is crucial if you want to expand your target audience, earn more revenue, and create long-term brand awareness. There are some benefits that SEO will give to your marketing strategies.
1. It boosts your credibility
A site that ranks high on search engine results pages is considered trustworthy and high-quality and this also boosts the credibility of your business.
2. It does not have to cost you anything
SEO does not cost anything like other marketing strategies. You just need to spend your time doing it.
3. It helps you reach more customers
Most marketing campaigns tend to focus on a defined target audience, SEO can help you attract anyone with intent at a given point in time, no matter what stage they are in.
4. It maximizes your PPC campaign
Having both results appear at the top of search results pages boosts your brand’s credibility and shows that you do not throw money into advertising completely.
5. You can get quantifiable results
You can track changes in rankings, conversions, and website traffic with SEO.
6. It improves website usability
Not only SEO makes your site search engine-friendly, but it also can improve the experience customers have when visiting your website.
7. It improves user engagement rates
If you have a site with useful content that matches the searcher’s intent, they will likely spend more time browsing your site, which ultimately can lead to more conversions and increased ROI.
Website marketing strategies
- Conduct a website analysis
- Optimize your website for SEO
- Start content marketing
- Build a social media presence
- Amplify with email marketing
- Use paid advertising to speed up your sales cycles.
Mobile Marketing
Definition and Statistics
Mobile marketing is a digital marketing strategy aimed at reaching a target audience on their smartphones, tablets, or mobile devices through websites, email, SMS, MMS, apps, etc.
Nowadays, there are more mobile devices in the world(8,7 billion) than people(7,1 billion), and 65,5% of global citizens over the age of 13 have smartphones. Customers have started to shift their attention to mobile. Therefore, mobile marketing can do wonders for driving brand value and demand for your products and services.
Mobile marketing is an indispensable tool for any company when mobile devices are more popular these days. The important players in this space are brands and service providers that enable mobile advertising. Mobile advertising targets customers not so much by demographics but by behavior.
The benefits of Mobile Marketing
1. Easy access
People use mobile phones most of the time; they spend most of their free time using mobile phones to relax. As a result, it is easy for them to access your ads or campaigns on their mobile phones.
2. Location and personalization
With mobile marketing, you can reach the customer anywhere at any time. By using location-based marketing, you can gather a lot of information about your customers’ preferences which helps personalize your advertising.
3. Instant transactions
For e-retailers, mobile marketing offers the unbeatable benefit of promoting instant transactions. You can satisfy your customers immediately.
4. Cost-effectiveness
The cost of mobile advertising is cheaper than advertising on radio or Tv because the screen size of mobile devices is smaller than with a laptop or desktop computer, so the available area for ads is limited.
5. Viral potential
Mobile marketing enhances the potential for things to “go viral”. You will get a lot more exposure at no extra cost.
6. Boost search engine rankings
More and more customers use mobile devices instead of desktop computers or laptops to carry out a search and otherwise browse the Internet. Consequently, a mobile-optimized site is essential. That means elements like page speed, design, and relevant ads as well as a proper SEO effort, the net result is a higher ranking on search engines.
7. Tracking and Analytics
Another advantage of mobile marketing is the ability to track user responses with ease. This gives more data and more insights to act upon.
Mobile marketing strategies
To elevate your business through mobile marketing, here are some types of mobile marketing strategies you can follow:
- Mobile Website
- Mobile apps
- In-game Advertising
- Shopping on social media
- SMS marketing
- Local listings
- Geofencing
Integrated Marketing
Definition and statistics
Nowadays, with the influx of different markets, channels, products as well as customers, marketers are facing a complex and fragmented landscape. To attract new customers in different mediums without spending too much on all means to reach their target audience, integrated marketing is a solution.
Integrated marketing is a type of digital marketing that aligns our marketing channels to promote your products or services in tandem, typically through a strategic campaign. Just like multi-channel marketing, integrated marketing exists to eliminate disparities and differences regardless of how or when customers interact with your brand; however, integrated marketing is what aligns the message you’re sharing on all of those channels.
The benefits of Integrated Marketing
The power of integrated marketing is limitless. Research has shown that integrated campaigns across more than four channels can outperform single or dual-channel campaigns by 300%.
Here are some advantages that may make you consider integrated marketing before implementing a certain marketing strategy.
- They reach a wider audience than a single marketing channel.
- They have the opportunity to be seen more across multiple channels; therefore, your brand stays in the spotlight and drives visitors closer to conversion.
- They build trust with visitors when they see a consistent message across multiple channels.
- They save you money because assets can be shared between different marketing channels, and depending on your campaign, customers can help you market your products or services.
Integrated marketing strategies
Here are some key strategies to help you build the right integrated marketing campaign for your business
1. Align behind the scenes
To successfully implement integrated marketing, your marketing channel managers regularly communicate about projects and campaigns.
Any integrated marketing or advertising campaigns should complement each other to avoid a fragmented brand experience for customers.
2. Consider the channel transition
Consider how visitors can view/experience each marketing channel if it’s their first visit and if they switch from another channel. Think about how each channel can help others convert.
3. Don’t neglect the small overlaps
Integrated marketing exists to close the gaps of traditional marketing and deliver a cohesive campaign experience.
Although these overlaps may not directly support your campaign goals, they help your customers switch seamlessly between channels, and enjoy a consistent, engaging brand experience. links and navigate to the page that converts them.